Games and Toys

“I Vant To Bite Your Finger! You play it in the dark! And if Count Dracula bites you, he’ll leave a Vampire mark!” Advertising jingles were ace in the 80s! This was a bizarre up to 4 player game in which you had to make your way around a board overlooked by a huge caped […]

The Speak & Maths, from Texas Instruments, was the follow up to the amazing Speak & Spell. It was the same shape but a silver, orange and blue theme. As with the Speak & Spell, it would ask you questions of varying difficulty based on the mode you selected and you keyed in the answer. […]

Major Morgan was a music device made by Playskool. It was designed to look like a marching band member, with a blue uniform and a nice red hat. It featured 16 separately numbered squares, each of which produced a different tone when pressed. In the box you also got a few pre-printed cards. These cards […]

Nintendo have lead the gaming revolution since the late 70s. WAY before the 3DS, before the Wii, before the DSi, DS lite and DS, before the N64, the SNES, the Gameboy and the NES, there were… Game And Watches. These pocket-sized rectangles of fun were originally single screen LCD games. No colour display, just black […]

Grandstand made some amazing games in the 80s! Munchman was a blatant Pac-Man clone. It had a maze, a dot eating character, ghosts, power-ups, the repetitive eating noise… it’s even shaped like Pac-Man himself, minus the mouth! The idea was to guide the Munchman around the maze, eating dots and avoiding the ghosts. The LEDs […]

The Atari 2600, originally released in 1977, is credited as being the first home computer games console to allow plug-in games. In reality that credit should go to the Fairchild Channel F, released a year earlier. It was the Atari 2600, however, that popularised the format. There were hundreds of cardridge games released for the […]

Man alive, this always seemed like a dangerous game! I never owned it myself, but I would have loved to have a go on one just to see how deadly it actually was! Well, ok, deadly might be a strong word. How dangerous may be a better one! The point of Crossfire was to fire […]

There can be no better 80s toy that the Transformer. For me, this was the ultimate 80s toy. I had about 10 of them, Bumblebee being my first ever one, and the Transformers Panini Sticker Album is the only one I EVER finished. Transformers were robots that you could transform into other things, usually vehicles. […]